


Of all the worlds

by luna65



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abighost, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, PTSD Will, Will has regrets, multiverse musings, sad empath noises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-18 21:15:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4720700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will deals with the aftermath of the Red Dinner, and his intrusive thoughts of Hannibal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of all the worlds

Will’s trauma cut deeper than his wound, this was something everyone agreed upon.

But the action of the wounding, it stayed with him; intimate as coupling, intense as savagery, and cold. As cold as if he’d spent days in his ice fishing shack, just him and the frozen lake and the peculiar silence which comes with winter. Suspension.

The act: the penetration, the embrace, and then the wounding.

Abigail’s death, and the death of whatever familial tableaux was to be...in some other time...instead to wake up to antiseptic daylight, empty ache, dry heaves of sobs, terror and horror and heartache.

A deeper ache than the one in his gut.

Blood still stained him, and he felt like he would never stop feeling its’ tacky wet heat, the molten coppery tang, the way in which there was no traction when you were lying in your own blood, the blood of others, the blood of yearning which is slaughtered and connection severed.

A clean cut, and a cruel one.

Gasping, surfacing from beneath fathoms of nightmares profoundly _true_ , wrenched from the last moments he saw those he bound in his own obsessive lures, dangling brightly ornate and he the wriggling bait to be swallowed.

But he had been spit out, ejected from his ambivalent hinterland. And now he wept upon the rocks of mournful regret. They too which possess jagged edges to wound.

_I couldn’t save them._

_I couldn’t succumb._

_I couldn’t run._

To see. And see. And see. No respite from revelation.

 _Didn’t I?_ still on his lips as he awoke, even if sometimes it sounded like a scream.

Only fragments. But truly shards. His dreams continue to jab and slice. Conflicted, walking the knife’s edge, sliding upon the blood.

And it’s not just his voice he hears.

 

_Of all the worlds, this one could have been ours._

Abigail’s beautiful bones, straining with sorrow, eyes wide and pleading.

There is no logic he can reach which does not ring hollow in his head full of ghosts and demons.

 

Will looks into the mirror which is a window and over his shoulder he sees the absence-in-presence of the murderous soul. He has come to associate this vision with Hannibal, but not the Hannibal he appeared to know. But he is aware that the part of him which intuits the impulse to shape the distortions of a world which shuns those who hear distress in the hum of the mundane and those who see murder in the placid rows of societal ordering - persistence of vision on the order of palinopsia - recognizes this darkness, this desire for control and for alteration.

But it’s the eyes.

Not the deep maroon of Hannibal’s eyes, it is the dark matter of the space in which nothing can be discerned: motive, rationale, emotion.

_I let you know me, see me._

But his worst fear is that he doesn’t know Hannibal at all. And therefore spies that same void in his own eyes.

 

_Why did you lie, if you wanted it?_

Abigail comes to him, every day, to ask this. She speaks for what he cannot reconcile, even now, and what aches is not his scar, but his wound. It will never close, he imagines, the cleft of Hannibal’s influence. The man’s presence not required when his gravity pulls Will, bit by struggling bit, across the miles.

The wound: Will’s reminder of Hannibal’s penetration. Not the most significant, but the most vivid. He can’t get over the look on Hannibal’s face as he carved his _droit du seigneur_ upon his skin, into his torso, inside his very flesh, an alteration he cannot reverse.

The FBI sends other trauma experts, as those he knew are equally incapacitated.

“Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in that kitchen, bleeding out on the floor, watching Abigail die beside me, looking up into eyes which seem filled with blood themselves, as he whispered to me like a terrible angel, come to usher me into that place some people think they go when they die. And who knows? Maybe he’s been there. Maybe that’s why he can walk like a wraith upon the land, and confound our efforts to trap him, cage him, annihilate him. Maybe I knew this all along, but I was too terrified to face it.”

They let him talk because what could any of them say? When they know monsters are real.

_You’ve penetrated parts of me and I cannot cut you out._

But he doesn’t want to, he wants that voice to linger, because the silence would be worse.

 

 

_Of all the worlds, this is the only one I could survive._

The therapist begins, “I understand -”

“So very few people truly understand. Because to do so is _dangerous_.”

And instead of whatever placatory phrase comes next, Will hears the voice of Bedelia.

_As evidenced by your condition._

It is so dry and sardonic it makes him laugh, veins of fire issuing from his wound, and the sound strikes him as the ragged broken caw of a carrion bird.

 

“It was surgical.”

“It was a _wounding_. Nothing so clinical, though controlled. Hannibal Lecter is all about control.”

“And you will recover from your wound. But I’m not so sure you will recover from his _influence_.”

“It’s not my wound, it’s **his**. His influence is something far easier to claim.”

 

“It’s funny,” he says to Abigail, “when someone is sad they say ‘I’m gutted,’ but they really have no idea what that truly means.”

“He had already eviscerated himself,” she replies softly. “For you. Can you blame him for wanting to do the same to you? After you told him how you wanted to kill him? And then you came at him with a gun. Twice.”

A wry smirk twists his mouth.

“The wound was only the end result. The penetration -”

He turns his head to spare himself the mortification but she has gone again.

_You must allow yourself to be intimate with your instincts, Will._

“Oh I am now,” he murmurs.

 

The source of love and mercy, of evil and abandonment, there is only one roiling vastness, waiting to claim everyone.

“It’s all in your head.”

“Isn’t everything?”

But some things are inscribed elsewhere, as external reminders, or disclaimers.

 

When the knife went in, he knew why.

 _This is what you could have had_ , as his blood covered them both. Then the embrace, final and finally. 

Every time he felt it, the sensation changed.

And the imago continued to evolve as the pain transformed in his memory.

 

Between those moments of reliving the penetration, he would recall past memories and dreams, the metaphorical admissions of intimacy and of love. The taste of mastery over the herd in his mouth, crunching on tiny bones like some polite Saturn devouring his son.

“Goya was disturbed by the notion of his own mortality. He did not embrace the mystery of the unknown, but feared it. This led to _The Black Paintings_ , portrayals of the decay and ugliness in faces, and of the futility in rituals.”

“I thought you prized the notion of ritual.”

“I value the transformative aspects of any convention, as long as the worth proves verifiable.”

“In what way?”

“There is never only one way to determine what may be extracted from crude materials.”

 

“You’d still go to him?”

“Yes.”

Where else was there _to go_ , after all? 

 

He could hear a distance, and chilly civility, in the voices of his colleagues. A lack of understanding, but all the empathy they could only pretend to expend lest they reveal their own complicity.

_The lamb was carved, and served, but no one had the appetite to devour what they had wrought._

Will and Abigail sat on the kitchen floor and it was just a room. But it was a room he could never leave.

 

 

“I didn’t know what else to do, so I just did what he told me.”

_Yes._

Hannibal’s face, as those maroon eyes looked up into his: everything revealed, everything true.

_You wanted what you saw._

And the knife opened him up like revelation. _He knows you and he wants you to remember that, always._

The only one who would ever truly understand.

 

Jack visits like a ghost, materializing out of the snow and speaking regret and broken promises. It hurts worse than being stabbed  
_penetrated_  
to speak the truth of his motivations.

A damning silence, then, the crackle of his welding torch making him think of all the potential hells he has been consigned to.

 

“This is your best possible world, Will” Chilton tells him. “You’re not getting a better one.”

Will is silent. But he knows the truth of it.

_Of all the worlds there are, I can choose to enter the one he’s in. The one we were meant to share._

 

 

As Will sails into the bay, face to the wind and the spray of the ocean before and beneath him, Abigail turns from where she is seated upon the bow, smiling. Her smile comforts him, reassuring him that there is no other destination, no other destiny, than to discover just how tight the vines entwine, how sharp the thorns prick, how beautiful the blossoms unfold, fed by blood and obsession. To continue the quest of his penetration with his own hands, twisting the knife like dreadful augury.


End file.
